To a large degree, the Yankees fell victim to a serious of injuries that made it impossible for them to mount a pennant drive:
BOSTON — When a stiff shoulder knocked Joba Chamberlain from his start in Texas on Aug. 4, the Yankees were finished for 2008. They had made such careful plans for Chamberlain, invested so much hope, and at that moment none of it mattered. Chamberlain was just another injury casualty in a doomed season.
The Yankees were two and a half games out of a playoff spot when Chamberlain went down. They went 16-20 in their next 36 games, a stretch that lasted into the final homestand at Yankee Stadium. Losing Chien-Ming Wang to a foot injury in June was brutal. Losing Chamberlain was fatal. Neither made another start.
“We had one ace go down, and we produced another No. 1,” General Manager Brian Cashman said. “Then he went down, too.”
It would be too simplistic to say injuries alone ruined the Yankees’ season. Years of corrosive institutional problems also forecast the end of their 13-year playoff run. But health was the biggest factor. The Yankees were not a bad team this season. But they were never whole.
The Tampa Bay Rays, surprise champions of the American League East, were the only team in the majors with five pitchers who each made 25 starts. The Yankees, who will finish third, had two pitchers make 25 starts. They were the only team in the majors that did not have three pitchers throw at least 115 innings.
They patched their rotation, and they might have gotten away with it if the offense had produced as it did in 2007. But that never happened. Injuries to Jorge Posada and Hideki Matsui — and regressions by Robinson Canó, Melky Cabrera, Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter — were too much to overcome.
In 2007, the Yankees scored 191 more runs than their opponents. This season, through Friday, they had outscored opponents by just 59 runs.
“Have they worked, have they grinded, have they done everything that they did last year? Yes, absolutely,” the hitting coach Kevin Long said. “But if you break it down much deeper than that, you can see why it didn’t transform into six runs a game. It just wasn’t going to happen. It was just something that, after opening day, never really transpired.”
The other problem facing the Yankees, though, was structural, and it was rooted in the old Steinbrenner habit of going after star players who were close to being past their prime and offering them multi-million dollar deals:
It was just those kinds of deals that started to infect the Yankees after they lost the 2001 World Series. That was when George Steinbrenner, their principal owner, demanded more control over baseball operations, sending the team on a four-year spending spree that started to wane when he yielded authority to Cashman after the 2005 season.
But last winter, when Steinbrenner put his sons, Hank and Hal, atop the hierarchy, the wild spending returned, over Cashman’s head. Hank Steinbrenner engineered the deals for Rodriguez (10 years, roughly $300 million), Posada (four years, $52.4 million) and Mariano Rivera (three years, $45 million).
As he kept spending, Hank Steinbrenner kept talking. He publicly campaigned for a deal for [Minnesota Twins Pitcher Johann] Santana, even though he had told Andy Pettitte he could take all the time he needed to decide on a $16 million option.
If the Yankees had held Pettitte to his original deadline — and if they had stood firm when Rodriguez came back to them — their thinking on the Santana deal might have been different. Cashman might have sacrificed Hughes and other prospects to get Santana, then signed Santana to a long-term contract.
But after the payouts to Rodriguez, Posada, Rivera and Pettitte (which totaled about $73 million for 2008), it seemed unwise to further bloat the payroll. The Yankees forged ahead with Pettitte and trusted Hughes and Ian Kennedy to hold spots at the back of the rotation. Pettitte faded badly in the second half, and Hughes and Kennedy did not win a game all season.
Cashman offered no apologies about putting faith in Hughes and Kennedy, offering the Twins as a parallel.
Perhaps, but if the Yankees had been in a position to pursue Santana, they wouldn’t have had to rest their fate in the hands of inexperienced pitchers like Hughes and Kennedy. Santana finished the regular season with a 16-7 record and an ERA of 2.53 — the Yankees could’ve used someone like him this year.
There are a lot of decisions that need to be made in the Bronx over the winter, and the pitching staff is only the start.
